After seeing Bruce Springsteen at Wembley, Michael Hann writes a deeply personal essay about the power of live music, not as redemption or catharsis, but as a unique and potent force that reflects who we are when we encounter it

erhaps the most important thing about Bruce Springsteen’s final show in Europe this summer lay in two songs that weren’t played, and one thing that was said. The two songs that weren’t played were ‘No Surrender’, from Born In The USA, and ‘Ghosts’, from 2020’s Letter to You. One or the other of those songs had been played at nearly every show since Springsteen and the E Street Band began this current run of touring last year, frequently as a pairing to open the show.

Last summer, the choice of songs felt very deliberate, both pieces of nostalgia for bandmates and companionship and a romantic dream of what rock music might represent. But the former, written when Springsteen was a young man, carries with it defiance, a sense of having been proved right when everyone else thought he was wrong. Its famous opening lines set its tone: “We busted out of class, had to get away from those fools / We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.” Having achieved all he dreamed of, there could be no retreat, no surrender.

‘Ghosts’, though, was released as a single the day before Springsteen turned 71. In this song, too, Springsteen remembers a companion in guitars, but this time the friend is gone, and he is struck by the knowledge that “I’m alive, and I’m out here on my own.” He makes his vows to continue, for himself, out of loyalty to the ghosts that walk by his side. Put the one after the other and the message seemed inescapable: this is what we were, and this is our fate.

Last summer, after seeing three shows – Villa Park, and two in London – I was convinced it was the last time I would see the E Street Band. It wasn’t just that pairing of songs, it was the whole construction of the set. For the first time, the E Street Band weren’t playing a seemingly freewheeling selection from down the years, but a rigid core setlist with the occasional substitution. The setlist was telling a story, and the story was: We are not long for this earth, as people, or as a band. It kept popping up: in the coupling of ‘Last Man Standing’ and ‘Backstreets’, the former a requiem for George Theiss, of his teenage garage band The Castiles, the latter given a monologue in honour of his old factotum and friend Terry Magovern; in the cover of The Commodores’ ‘Nightshift’, a lament for Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson. As if to hammer the point home, the final encore has always been I’ll See You in My Dreams: “For death is not the end / I’ll see you in my dreams.”

I still think the original show was conceived as a goodbye. But it has evidently ceased to be that. Introducing ‘Last Man Standing’ at Wembley on Saturday night, Springsteen told his usual story, of how the Castiles lasted three years – pretty good for teenagers – but that the E Street Band had been together 50 years. Then he looked up and added a few extra words: “And we ain’t fucking going nowhere.”

There are bands I love but never need to see more than once on any tour. AC/DC, for example. I love to hear that set once, but given it’s more or less the same set they’ve been playing for 40 years, and I know every one of the songs back to front, I don’t need to hear it twice with an evening in front of the telly separating the shows. But there are also bands I will go to see night after night, knowing I will hear something different and feel something different. I’m no hardcore National fan, but I wished I had been last year, when they played completely different sets on consecutive nights. I go to see The Hold Steady every time I can, watching them over several nights at a time, feeling the mood and the pace change.

It’s not just a case of wanting to recapture the excitement of that greatest ever gig, the one we all hold in our minds as the perfect performance. Nor is it simple fandom, the need to be at every possible performance (though I’ve had that plenty of times in my life), though to go repeatedly, of course, you probably need to be a committed fan. Yet committed fans don’t always get the best end of the deal. The production arms race that is live music means fewer and fewer big shows dare to be unpredictable. When every moment is synchronised by computer – each visual, each lighting change, each pyro – everything has to happen at a precise moment in a precise place. It’s more like watching a musical than a gig. If you get the same thing every night, how do you parse something different from each show? So salutes to those big pop acts with young repeat audiences, who do try to make shows different. Salutes to Taylor Swift for playing her surprise songs every night, and to The 1975, who’ve rotated 70 songs in their current setlist, with only three played every night.

Why do people go to gig after gig? For me, in part, it is the unicorn hunt of the superfan, the desperate hope that you’ll get something special you seldom hear, which both Springsteen and The Hold Steady deliver with rewarding frequency. But more important than the fandom, the being part of something, is the internal: the emotional impact of the forces coming together at that moment in time as the band plays. They are the forces we generate ourselves, from whatever turmoil is within us, and the forces imposed on us by the words and the music we hear, and the forces of the crowd we are part of.

I feel these forces more keenly at Springsteen shows than at any other live performance, despite being – by Springsteen standards – nowhere near a superfan. I crave the emotions I am going to feel when he performs, the sense of joy and release. The euphoria, and the inexplicable tears, of something that might be joy, but might be its inverse. And how I will react, of course, depends on what emotions I bring to each show.

That is why Springsteen has such an effect on me. Because the ambiguity and emotional complexity in his best songs sounds like real life.

It doesn’t matter how much of it is bullshit, and there have always been people who’ve called Springsteen out as a bullshitter. Way back when, John Sinclair, the Detroit countercultural figure, wrote: “Springsteen’s songs are not songs of direct experience compellingly told as acts of cathartic artistic release. They are tales of a mythic urban grease song which, taken together, form a script for a third-rate television treatment of delinquent white youngsters of the slums.” Springsteen himself admits he’s never done a day’s work in his life. All those songs about working? Just made up off the top of his head – but that is the power of art and imagination.

I have no idea if his portrayals of New Jersey working class life are true, but his portrayals of shattered hope and tattered dreams, of self-doubt and self-loathing, of trying to find a spark to light the darkness – those are all true. Those are emotions everyone feels. That’s what Springsteen understands and tries to draw out.

Eight years ago, I interviewed Springsteen and asked about live performance, specifically about what he meant when he referred to the “covenant” between him and his audience depending on honesty. His answer was a marvel, the kind that makes you realise quite how important the act of performing songs to an audience that needs to hear them can be.

“I guess we come out and deliver the straight dope to our crowd as best we can,’ he said. ‘It’s coming on stage with the idea: OK, well the stakes that are involved this evening are quite high. I don’t know exactly who’s in the crowd. But I know that my life was changed in an instant by something that people thought was purely junk – pop music records. And you can change someone’s life in three minutes with the right song. I still believe that to this day. You can bend the course of their development, what they think is important, of how vital and alive they feel. You can contextualise very, very difficult experiences. Songs are pretty good at that. So all these are the stakes that are laid out on the table when you come out at night. And I still take those stakes seriously after all that time, if not more so now, as the light grows slightly dimmer. I come out believing there’s no tomorrow night, there wasn’t last night, there’s just tonight. And I have built up the skills to be able to provide, under the right conditions, a certain transcendent evening, hopefully an evening you’ll remember when you go home. Not that you’ll just remember it was a good concert, but you’ll remember the possibilities the evening laid out in front of you, as far as where you could take your life, or how you’re thinking about your friends, or your wife or your girlfriend, or your best pal, or your job, your work, what you want to do with your life. These are all things, I believe, that music can accommodate and can provide service in. That’s what we try to deliver.”